Novell and Microsoft have each filed summary judgment motions in the antitrust litigation about WordPerfect that Novell brought against Microsoft. In addition, we find out what happened regarding the Bill Gates deposition. And neither party can find certain documents that might be in the Comes collection. I wonder if you can?

Remember how they were fighting about whether or not he'd have to submit to a second deposition to fill out the time that Novell had a right to? Well, he had to, despite Microsoft's claim that he's too important leading his foundation and fixing global health and such to have to submit to another deposition. It's Microsoft's Exhibit 10, and it oozes
his usual level of charm [PDF] at depositions.

Amazing, no? It will take me days more to finish reading it all. One particularly interesting discovery matter involves the Comes database. Of course, there is much more to it than just the trial exhibits that we got to look at. Microsoft says it can't be the one to look for certain documents in it, since Novell has the whole database and it can look itself for what it wants. Novell says it can't find any evidence of some of Microsoft's claims.

It has to do with whether or not Microsoft made certain APIs available, like IShellBrowser, iShellView, iPersistFolder, and iCommDlgBrowser. Novell says Microsoft decided to make those APIs private and iShellFolder a "read only public interface", making it impossible for Novell to use the namespace extension mechanism or implement it in a customized fashion, so Novell software couldn't rely on or invoke those APIs. The context is Windows 95 and NT, in the years between 1994 and 1996.

Microsoft claims it did publish them or give them to ISVs. Microsoft witnesses talk about b-list API documentation being provided to companies on request. B-list here means APIs that Microsoft didn't promise to support going forward or that might not work. One witness, Robert Muglia, says that it wasn't just on request, that "they were in the SDK; they were talked about at conferences; they were brought up; they were available, period, not just on request; we didn't say they were internal interfaces only; we never told -- we may have told people they might not work in the next version of Windows or in NT, but clearly people were able to use them". But where is there evidence of that, other than people saying so, Novell asks?

The other topics of dispute are about some studies of Microsoft's logo certification that were allegedly done between 1993 and 1996 (an end user study in 1993 and a "May 1996 Marketing Research, Microsoft Internal Study") and about Microsoft's Windows 95 printing subsystem.

In the Paul Maritz deposition, reference is made to an email "from Belfiore to Shulman attaching the documentation" of the namespace extensions. All of this is found in the Appendix [PDF].

And in interrogatory 21, Novell asked Microsoft to identify all communications between it and any ISVs between October 1994 and July 1996 concerning namespace APIs. Microsoft told Novell to find it itself, but it can't find anything like that. I wonder if any of you have noticed anything like that in your reading of the Comes trial exhibits? They also asked Microsoft about MAPI changes between 3.1 and 95, and about APIs in Windows 95 communicated to ISVs to enable them to implement a custom print processor, to enable background printing. The APIs for that would be GetJob, SetJob, PrintDocumentOnPrintProcessor, AddPrintProcessor, and DeletePrintProcessor.

So if any of you came across anything relevant to any of those topics, this would be a perfect time to say so.

Update: The BoycottNovell folks have found one. We have it here also, on our Comes Exhibits page, Plaintiffs Exhibit 2158, which is an email from Microsoft's Satoshi Nakajima, dated October 10, 1994. It reads like this:

What:
Based on the recent decision, we are hiding one of shell extension mechanisms (see below for details). I marked all those interfaces and definitions ";internal" so that we don't put them in the SDK header files any more. Out dev. partners will receive these new headers (shlobj.h and shlguid.h) before M7 release.

Notes:
Capone/Marvel - They may keep building their modules with our old public header files until M7, should use new public header after M7.
Fonts folder - George (M), We need to establish a way to update those private headers that Elsware has.

We won't change the definitions of those interfaces until M7 release so that those name space extensions (Capone and Marvell) run well. We may change those interfaces (or at least their GUID) after M7 to intentionally break those apps (please let me know if you are using those mechanisms internally).

Keep in mind that Groklaw's grouch has a more complete folder of the Comes exhibits than we do here, and they came from the Comes plaintiffs then-website, www.iowaconsumercase.org, and nowhere else. An anonymous comment also mentions 4293 [PDF] ("the way to shut out novell in the base is to either ship a full client or make it so there is no network connectivity" and 5673 [PDF] (Gates, October 3, 1994: "It is time for a decision on IShellBrowser....I have decided that we should not publish these extensions. We should wait until we have a way to do a high level of integration that will be harder for likes of Notes, Wordperfect to achieve, and which will give Office a real advantage....Our goal is to have Office '96 sell better because of the shell integration work..." To which Brad Silverberg wrote: "I will jump in -- yes we have to take them out of marvel and capone too.").